


Anthem Part Two

by Armygirl0604



Series: Family Reunion [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Claudia Stilinski, Alive Talia Hale, Derek Hale is Bad at Feelings, Derek and Stiles are Mates, Derek and Stiles are the Same Age, Derek is a Failwolf, Eventual Sex, Eventual Sterek, F/F, F/M, Kid Derek, M/M, Multi, Sequel, Slow Build Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, kid stiles, scott is the best big brother ever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2015-05-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 09:55:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2647646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Armygirl0604/pseuds/Armygirl0604
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to "What's My Age Again?"<br/>At four years old, they are inseparable. Where Stiles goes, Derek goes. With the exclusion of full moon nights, it is assumed that if Stiles is doing something, Derek will be right by his side. They get Scott and Isaac to build them pillow forts and they wheedle cookies out of Claudia and all around cause havoc wherever and whenever possible. And life, for them at least, is good.</p><p>It comes crashing down nine years later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Outsider

**Author's Note:**

> Back by (apparently?? Wow, thanks guys!) popular request, I bring you mini-Stiles and mini-Derek shenanigans galore!  
> Since this is going to be a series in progress, if you have any scenes you'd like to request, feel free to drop them in the comments box and I'd be happy to do my best to work them in.

               Three days after their very public shouting match in gym, Stiles can’t even remember what their fight was about. All he knows is that Derek is still mad at him; mad enough to switch seats with Justin Greenburg, who is nice but not his best friend. Plus, all he does is lean forward and talk to Ashley Moran and pull on her pretty blond curls. So Derek hasn’t just deprived Stiles of his friendship but of a decent table partner as well. He’s about ten seconds from dumping their beaker of ice water on Justin’s head or possibly just rubbing their crushed alka seltzer tablets into the boy’s hair when Ashley’s partner taps Justin on the shoulder. “Since you two clearly want to work together, why don’t we switch?” The boy looks just as put out as Stiles feels, but Justin and Ashley don’t seem to notice. Justin gathers up his things so fast he almost knocks over their beakers, eliciting a squawk of protest from Stiles, who flails to protect the plastic containers from toppling over. Ashley’s partner pushes the beakers further away from the edge of the desk and collects his books with a thousand times the grace attributed to Justin.

                Stiles almost has trouble believing that the boy who sits down next to him is a real person who actually lives in a town like Beacon Hills. He’s all grace and poise, with perfectly styled hair and a crisply ironed button-down shirt that’s tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He has a dark denim suit jacket pushed up to his elbows and thick black square-framed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Stiles will openly admit that he stares a little bit before blurting out, “Are you from England? You dress like an English kid.” He turns bright red before he’s even finished getting the words out.

                The boy’s eyes narrow, but before he can so much as open his mouth, a snort from the desk directly in front of Stiles draws their attention. There’s a girl watching them, her hand covering her mouth to hide her smile. Stiles has to blink a few times to clear what he thinks might be double vision. He looks rapidly between the two, but never gets to ask his question. “We’re not twins,” the boy says sharply. “We’re not even related.”

                The girl claps a hand over her heart. “You know something, Stuart that hurts. It hurts me that you don’t think of us as family after all we’ve been through.”

                “Like what, your anime phase?” the boy, Stuart, drawls.              

                The girl’s face darkens momentarily before she turns to Stiles. “Stuart always dresses like that,” she says. “But I promise, he was born and raised in small town Northern California. Personally, I figure his brain was poisoned by how much sand he ate as a kid and my mom figures it was his mother’s love of What Not to Wear reruns, but the jury is still out. Who knows? He might just be weird.” She pauses for a second. She starts to say, “I’m-” but her partner chooses that moment to return from the bathroom and their teacher finally takes notice of the conversation.

                “Miss Sams, do Mr. Stilinski and Mr. Smith need help?”

                The girl shakes her head. “Not any more than usual, Ms. Prince,” she says cheerfully. She turns back to her partner without so much as glancing at them again.

                Stiles looks at Stuart. “So.” He sounds awkward, he _knows_ he sounds awkward, but it seems these days like everything that comes out of his mouth is awkward, so he just lets it go. “Are you going to just stand there like you’re posing for paparazzi or are you going to help me with this?”

                A flicker of a smile crosses Stuart’s face. “What she was going to say,” he says as he reaches for a beaker and seltzer tablet, “is that her name is Margaret and she’s been dying to know why you and Hale fought.” The girl cocks her head as if she’s listening.

                But the thing is, Stiles doesn’t _know_. He doesn’t understand the fight himself. One second, he’d been idly watching Derek shoot hoops and halfheartedly trying to make some free throws himself while they made small talk and the next moment Derek had been snarling at him that if Stiles didn’t want to hang out with him, he could take a hike. He glances around. Derek is still in the bathroom filling up his beaker, so Stiles says, “I’m not really sure. But it’s-fine,” he says. “It’s not like I _need_ him or anything. I have other friends.” It’s so much of a lie that he cringes.

                Stuart furrows his eyebrows and frowns at him. “You do the large tablet,” he says. “I’ll measure the beakers with the pieces and the powder.” He angles himself away from Stiles and just like that, Stiles is plunged into solitude once more.

                Except that, weirdly, it doesn’t actually feel like solitude. Maybe it’s the way Stuart glances over to check on Stiles’s progress every now and again, or it could be how every time her lab partner tries to make small talk, Margaret glances at Stiles’s and Stuart’s table with an expression that can only mean “Help me”, but Stiles doesn’t actually feel all that alone. Sure, he’d rather have Derek, but if he can’t have Derek, they aren’t horrible as replacements. He and Stuart finish their lab just before the bell rings. Stiles takes the beakers to the bucket where Ms. Prince told them to dump them out and while he’s gone, he sees Margaret leaning precariously over the his desk to talk to Stuart. They’re whispering sharply to one another and twice they both glance up to stare at him before returning to their conversation. By the time he’s back at his desk, Stuart has disposed of their paper towels and Popsicle sticks and returned their stopwatch to the tub of them in the front of the room.

                Margaret sits backwards in her chair to face Stiles as soon as he sits down. “Do you want to have lunch with us?” She says it like it’s a question, but her face doesn’t leave any room for argument. She glances at Stuart. “Stuey here-” She stops to smirk at him as he practically growls at her. “Okay, okay, Stuart thinks the cafeteria is for wimps so we always go sit on the bleachers. You could come, if you wanted.”

                The bleachers. Halfway the territory of those who are popular and halfway the territory of the outcast kids. The ones who dye their hair neon colors and wear fake piercings and sit around playing music on their phones together. Stuart reads his expression. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We sit in No Man’s Land.” No Man’s Land is a precarious, constantly moving place. Sometimes it’s a four-foot wide strip of space stretching directly down the center of the bleachers, successfully dividing the space in half. Sometimes it’s just a random chunk of space in the center of one of the territories. Sometimes it’s the entire bottom or top row. It’s never in the same place two days in a row and it’s the one place in the gym that statically goes untouched by either group.

                The lunch bell rings and Stiles has only to glance up for half a second to know that Derek has shot off like a rocket to avoid encountering Stiles at the doorway. Stiles sighs and nods. “Sure,” he says.

 

* * *

                It turns out they are all packed-lunchers. Stuart has a neatly organized black lunchbox filled with neatly organized compartments of different foods. He pulls out a small Tupperware full of a tan colored paste, a baggie of sliced vegetables, and a plastic package of crackers. Margaret pouts at him and he sighs heavily. “What do you have?” he asks. The way he asks the question reminds Stiles of the way his father sounds after Stiles tells him he’s broken something (again.)

                Margaret opens her brown paper bag and pulls out a sandwich. “Mom made the bread yesterday,” she wheedles. She rolls onto her knees so she can lean up and wave the sandwich in Stuart’s face. He bats her away with what Stiles is pretty sure is feigned annoyance. “Please?” she begs.

                Stuart huffs and shoves his Tupperware, veggie sticks, and crackers at her. “Here,” he says. “But don’t even think about trying to steal my apple or my cookie.” He looks over at Stiles, who is sitting next to him and hasn’t even made a move to open his lunchbox and says, “She adores my mom’s hummus. Luckily, her mom makes passable vegan-friendly bread.”

                “Passable!?” Margaret shrieks. “I’ll give you ‘passable.’” She flings a piece of a cracker at him. It lands in his lap and he brushes it away. “My mom’s bread,” she tells Stiles, “is amazing. Mom is the best cook to ever walk the earth.”

                Stiles finds it prudent to point out that this can’t possibly be true, since Claudia Stilinski is a goddess in the kitchen and he has an “uncle” named Isaac who had a full ride to a culinary school, so he does. Stuart snorts and Margaret just looks offended. She bites down hard on a cracker, scattering crumbs across her lap. Stuart rolls his eyes. “Use a napkin, would you?” he says.

                There is a heart with an arrow through it drawn on the outside of her bag. The nickname “Maggie” is written in loopy cursive inside the heart. “So do you go by Maggie or Margaret?” Stiles asks. Margaret pauses in rifling through the bag and Stuart chokes on a bite of his sandwich.

                “It’s Margaret,” she says. “Unless you want me to cut out your spleen.” Considering she’s a thirteen year old girl wearing a bright pink Disney shirt and matching hair bows, Stiles highly doubts she could actually do that. But he still nods, just in case she can. He finally opens his lunchbox and takes out a Tupperware of leftover vegetable lasagna and a plastic fork. “So,” she says. “I was thinking that this year for my birthday we could go to San Francisco.”

                Stuart groans. “Are you going to make me spend four hours in the Exploratorium again?”

                Margaret looks personally affronted. “No,” she says. “I’m not a _kid_ anymore, Stu. I’m going to be fourteen.” She looks over at Stiles. “He says that like he didn’t have the time of his life last year. But anyways,” she continues, “no. I was thinking I might like to go to Pier 39 and then down to Lands End. We could have dinner at the Cliff House again. What do you think, Stiles?” She looks over at him again and Stiles looks up at her in alarm, his mouth full of food. “Well?” she presses.

                Stiles chews and swallows. He’s been trying to mostly tune them out, since this was clearly a conversation meant for people attending. “It’s your birthday. You should do what you want.”

                Margaret huffs and rolls her eyes. “I can still get other opinions, can’t I?”

                Stuart shoves his apple core into the plastic bag that had contained his sandwich and moves onto a small container of cookie bars. “Margaret, you can’t force someone to go to your birthday,” he says. “It’s rude.”

                “Wait, what?” Stiles drops his last bite of lasagna. It plops back into the Tupperware and a lone pea rolls to freedom. “Did I miss something?”

                Margaret looks apologetic. “No, Stuart is right. Look, you don’t have to come. It’s not, like, a condition to being our friend. We won’t get mad if you don’t want to.”

                Stiles abandons his attempts to recapture the pea and eats the last bite of his lasagna without it. “I feel like I’m missing something here,” he says. “Like the part where I was invited to come?”

                Margaret blinks. “Of course you’re invited. We were literally talking about it right here.”

                “Yeah,” Stuart says. “As if we’d have that conversation in front of you without you being included. We’re not animals.”

                It’s not like it hasn’t happened to Stiles before. Many times. Dozens of times. It’s never bothered him-he’s always had Derek and they’ve been their own universe for as long as he can remember. But he finds that it’s nice to be included. “I don’t know if my dad would let me. That’s like four hours away, right?” The sheriff barely lets him go to the grocery store bathroom alone. All the way to San Francisco? Not likely.

                “Yeah, but we’re always home by ten thirty. My birthday is over the weekend, too, so it won’t be that big of a deal if we’re home a little later,” Margaret says. “But Mom is pretty good at making sure we’re home by then because of Stuart’s parents.”

“They go to bed at 10:45 and they want me back before they go to sleep,” Stuart explains.

                “Yeah, so his mom can kiss him goodnight,” Margaret jokes. Stuart swats at her and she ducks, coming precariously close to falling off her bench and tumbling down the bleachers. Stuart grabs her arm to steady her and she rights herself. “Anyways, we can all sleep at my house on Friday. Mom will get us up early to drive there, we can spend the whole day having our adventure, and then we’ll drive back and you can sleep in on Sunday.”

                Stiles looks around for Derek, instinctively looking to check his friend’s opinion, but then he remembers that Derek isn’t here. Derek is part of a whole other world than this, one where they eat in the cafeteria and have never been invited to the gym, a world where Derek isn’t speaking to him. The four times Stiles has tried to approach Derek, the Hale boy has run away-twice, literally. Stiles swallows hard and smiles at Margaret. “What do you want for your birthday?”

               


	2. Hiatus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hiatus note

Hey everyone. So I'm sure you've noticed that this hasn't been updated since the first chapter was posted. I'm going to keep this short because I really don't want to talk about it but basically I lost my co-writer/idea man to a car crash a few weeks after that first chapter was posted and even though I have a bit of what we wrote plus some other odds and ends that could form the next chapters, I'm just not ready to post without him.   
I'll get to this. I want to come back and finish it because we started it and it made him happy and it made me happy and we had fun writing down our ideas together but.   
I can't yet. Sorry everyone who was waiting on a chapter. Give me a little more time and I will do my best to get one posted and start the process again alone.  
Thank you.


End file.
